At a time when our foreign policy is in the hands of the feckless, delusional, and incompetent, it is bracing to have Peter Collier’s fascinating biography of Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s smart, no-nonsense, straight-talking ambassador to the U.N. Collier, along with his sometime co-author David Horowitz, is the Plutarch of American political biography, having authored earlier books on the Kennedys, Fords, Rockefellers, and Roosevelts. Himself a convert from left-wing dogma and delusion, he brings to Kirkpatrick’s life both flawless story-telling skills and a shrewd eye for the psychological, intellectual, and social detail that tracks Kirkpatrick’s development from a reflexive liberal Democrat to a formidable opponent of appeasement and the staunch defender of political freedom who became, in William Safire’s phrase, “the courage of Ronald Reagan’s convictions.”

Kirkpatrick’s life is a paean to the American heartland and its clear-eyed realism about human nature and the limits of the politically possible. She was born in 1926 in Duncan, Oklahoma to a New Deal, Yellow-Dog Democrat oil driller named Welcher “Fat” Jordan. In 1940 the family followed the oil boom to Mount Vernon, Illinois, where Jeane’s keen intellect and restless curiosity fomented dissatisfaction with the small-town limits on both her mind and gender. Her first stop was at Stephens College, a two-year girls’ school in Columbia, Missouri. A visit to New York City convinced her that her intellectual ambitions needed larger scope, so she enrolled at Barnard, “where women could take themselves seriously,” she would write later. On weekends she hung out in the Village, and knew James Baldwin well enough to call him “Jimmy.” Yet a trajectory that seemingly pointed to becoming a conventional left-wing New York intellectual was deflected by her critical mind, which was not satisfied with the received opinions of her milieu. Contrary to her professors and classmates, for example, a reading of the Alger Hiss trial transcripts convinced her of Hiss’s guilt. Likewise she supported Truman in the 1948 elections while the “romantic leftists,” as Collier calls them, voted for Henry Wallace.

Her independent intellectual development continued at Columbia University, where she studied political science. Her mentor was Franz Neumann, a German Jew who had been a lawyer in the Weimer government. Neumann was an independent Marxist who lacked the starry-eyed admiration for Stalin that afflicted many American leftists. Her study of the inner workings of Nazi governance, which taught her, as she said later, “the human capacity for evil,” changed her life. So too did meeting Evron Kirkpatrick in Washington D.C. in 1951, who hired her as his research assistant. “Kirk,” as he was called, worked in the State Department and was a close friend of Hubert Humphrey as well as an anti-communist New Deal Democrat. Fourteen years Jeane’s senior, he became “the Pygmalion who would intellectually sculpt her in a way that brought her fully to life,” Collier writes. Her first assignment was to edit some papers detailing daily life in the prewar Soviet Union. The experience of learning what Kirkpatrick called “a hell purposefully created by government” was another critical stage in her development as a warrior against totalitarianism and its appeasers.

Kirkpatrick’s next stop was Paris, where she traveled to escape a serious illness and a burgeoning romance with Kirk. Once more, a path that would have led a less critical intelligence into leftist orthodoxy was blocked by Kirkpatrick’s reaction to the famous quarrel between one-time comrades Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre over support for the Soviet Union and its permanent revolution. Reading Camus’ The Rebel and listening to his lectures convinced Kirkpatrick that Camus had both the facts on his side and the moral high ground. She was particularly impressed by what she called “his suspicion of abstract theory and its friendship with totalitarianism; his elevation of the human dimension over the political one; his focus on the impact of ideas and the personal consequences of ideologies.” As Collier describes this transformative experience, one begins to see emerging the champion of freedom and human dignity who three decades later would give moral and intellectual force to Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy.

Back from France, Kirkpatrick eventually married Kirk and settled in Georgetown, where she connected with others like herself, heartland refugees, “very American, yet slightly alien among the elites” of postwar Washington, Collier describes them, bright people from modest backgrounds who “made their way by sheer intellectual force rather than by networks,” “pragmatic ‘show me’ people, and unapologetic in a patriotism that would not be shaken even during the turbulence of the Vietnam era.” She met other recovering leftists, like onetime Trotskyite James Burnham, and former communist Sidney Hook, both of whom later would become some of flabby liberalism’s most trenchant critics. As the sixties spiraled downward into left-wing thuggish intolerance, knee-jerk anti-Americanism, and apologetics for communist tyranny, she began to see the same conditions she had studied in other countries that had degenerated into totalitarianism from a lofty, abstract utopianism. The New Left’s assault on centrist liberalism––institutionalized in the 1972 highjacking of the Democratic party and its marginalization of lower-middle and working-class constituents in favor of a “new elite” of lawyers and other professionals––was to Jeane another sign that the old anti-communist, socially compassionate but pragmatic liberal Democrat no longer had a place in a party increasingly dominated by the sectarian left. Like many of those liberals who would get mugged by reality, Kirkpatrick had to find a more independent path.

Question & Answer Session

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Republicans and some former intelligence professionals expressed anger at the administration for failing to protect Dr. Afridi. Representative Peter King (R-NY) suggested that the White House “put him [Afridi] out there,” but the administration immediately denied the charge, suggesting that it was Pakistan that leaked Afridi’s name.

While the cut may be small, it comes on the heels of a re-examination of aid to Pakistan by Congress. In light of the closing by Pakistan of the primary truck route into Afghanistan last November following a friendly fire incident, the subcommittee on foreign aid voted recently to cut military assistance to Pakistan by 58%. And the anger expressed by senators over the treatment of Dr. Afridi suggests that a sea change may have occurred in congressional opinion regarding support for Pakistan, as members appear tired and frustrated with Islamabad’s double game of supporting terrorists while reluctantly assisting US intelligence in tracking down members of al-Qaeda.

Who is Dr. Shakil Afridi and what was his role in the bin Laden raid? The top medic in the Kyber tribal region, Afridi was recruited by the CIA to run a fake Hepatitis-B vaccination program in Abbottabad in order to acquire a DNA sample from one of bin Laden’s children in the compound where he was hiding. An investigation by the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, concluded that Afridi probably didn’t know he was helping the CIA find bin Laden specifically. Brig. General Shaukat Qadir, who conducted the investigation, wrote in a report obtained by the BBC that, “He was merely paid to follow instructions.”

The mystery is why Afridi, who was arrested less than 3 weeks after bin Laden was killed, stuck around after the raid. It may be that Afridi believed his assistance to the CIA in killing bin Laden would please the Pakistani government. It is even possible that Afridi didn’t know he was working for the CIA. Regardless, the Obama administration apparently did little to persuade the doctor to leave Pakistan.

Former intelligence analyst Peter Brookes of the Heritage Foundation told Fox News, “You probably wouldn’t want to have tipped him off ahead of time, but maybe the day right afterward you would have wanted to have helped him leave Pakistan — and the same with anybody else who was working with us.”

But former military intelligence officer Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer told Fox News, “From what I’m hearing, we did pretty much nothing,” he said. “We did nothing diplomatically at all, didn’t raise a finger. … From what my sources tell me, we did nothing to try and help this guy.”

State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland disputes that, saying the administration had “regularly taken up” the issue of Dr. Afridi with the Pakistani government. Shaffer suggests that if they did, they did not press the issue due to the sensitivity of ongoing negotiations over re-opening the truck route into Afghanistan.

In fairness, most liberals do not feel affection for the worst of the worst among leftists such as Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Che Guevara, or Peoples Temple founder Jim Jones.

But there are a few domestic radicals who have attained a kind of folk hero status in left-wing circles.

Convicted cop killer and Black Panthers member Mumia abu Jamal, would-be GOP convention bombers David Guy McKay and Bradley Neil Crowder, ACORN founder and cyber-terrorism advocate Wade Rathke, Obamacare architect and convicted swindler Robert Creamer, Earth Day booster and murderer Ira Einhorn, imprisoned terrorist lawyer Lynne Stewart, Weather Underground leaders Jeff Jones, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn, just to name a few.

“Speedway Bomber” Brett Kimberlin isn’t famous enough yet to have a cult following on the Left but give the determined, energetic activist time. A few short years after his release from federal prison the radical leftist has been embraced by all the right people, winning grants from the George Soros-funded Tides Foundation and wealthy celebrities.

He’s earned the confidence of leftist luminaries such as Teresa Heinz Kerry and Barbra Streisand who have sent money to his activist group, the Justice Through Music Project. The seven-year-old Bethesda, Maryland-based 501c3 nonprofit entity buys into the radical environmentalist agenda, supports the goals of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and claims to have registered 100,000 people to vote. (See its latest IRS Form 990 [tax return] here.)

This Maryland resident is a political trailblazer of sorts. Kimberlin is a tactical innovator whose tried and true methods would have impressed the father of modern community organizing, Saul Alinsky. The late conservative Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart recognized Kimberlin’s unique talents last fall, tweeting that the convicted terrorist and his confederates needed “exposure.”

Kimberlin, as blogger “Liberty Chick” previously reported, spent almost 17 years in prison after being convicted of detonating bombs in a week-long terror spree in Speedway, Indiana. “One of the blasts horribly maimed a man so badly that it directly led to that man’s suicide a few years later, which was proven when the widow of that bombing victim successfully sued and won a civil judgment against Kimberlin for $1.6 million,” she wrote. Of course Kimberlin not only failed to pay the woman, but denied doing anything wrong. His refusal to cough up what he owed his victim’s wife led to a revocation of his parole.

He also claimed he was secretly exonerated by the powers that be. A record of this surreptitious pardon is bound to surface any day now, delivered by a leprechaun in a unicorn-pulled stage coach.

Until proof of the covert clemency arrives, Kimberlin is focusing on bullying conservatives into silence, which is the same thing that so much of progressivedom is concentrating on nowadays. But unlike Van Jones and the various Marxist agitators who have inflicted damage on conservative talk radio and innocuous groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) through innuendo and smears, Kimberlin gets in his enemies’ faces.

Literally.

A man named Aaron Walker (blogging name Aaron Worthing) is now claiming that Kimberlin tried to frame him for a crime he did not commit. Kimberlin alleges that Walker battered him in a court house even though it’s pretty clear from videos and other evidence that nothing of the sort happened. Walker explains what happened in a heavily annotated, nearly 28,000 word essay at his website Allergic to Bull. In a nutshell, it appears Walker briefly snatched Kimberlin’s iPad away because he feared the violent ex-con was going to hit him with it. Walker says he never made physical contact with Kimberlin and the video evidence embedded in the lengthy blog post appears to confirm his story. The minor scuffle created more legal headaches for Walker.

Why was Walker in court with Kimberlin? Because Kimberlin sued him for daring to write about his criminal record.

In 2009, Playboy Magazine published an execrable screed by writer Guy Cimbalo. His topic? 10 conservative women he’d like to “hate-f**k.” Mr. Cimbalo’s reasoning? “But there is a way to reach across the aisle without letting principles fall by the wayside. We speak, naturally, of the hate f**k. We may despise everything these women represent, but godd*mmit they’re hot. Let the healing begin.” Cimbalo goes into detail. TownHall columnist Amanda Carpenter, “is a walking, talking Faustian f**k bargain.” Syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin is a ‘”highly fu**able Filipina” and a “Beelzebabe.” Fox News’ Megyn Kelly is also debased. “You need to flagellate your genitals for wanting to f**k this woman.” Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who co-hosts’ “The View” is “the clean-cut American sweetheart who elicits our filthiest thoughts. Endlessly perky, this golden goddess probably has her Catholic school uniform still in the closet, and she wouldn’t mind putting it on before taking it off for a session of sweaty, anti-American hate f**king.”

Flynt and Cimbalo are hardly unique. Former Florida Congresswoman Katherine Harris who was at the center of the recount controversy in the 2000 presidential election, was repeatedly mocked by several leftists seemingly obsessed with her breasts. After a 2005 appearance on Fox’s Hannity & Colmes she was derided for “working her admittedly impressive twin assets to best advantage,” her “fake, bouncing breasts” and for really wanting to “accentuate her heaving bosom” during the interview. Moving up the political hierarchy, liberal Wisconsin radio host John “Sly” Sylvester sexually denigrated Republican lieutenant governor Rebecca Kleefisch, contending she performed “fellatio on all the talk-show hosts in Milwaukee” and had “pulled a train,” as in taking on a number sexual partners at the same time.

First Ladies are fair game as well. In 2005, serial misogynist Bill Maher did a “comedy” bit about how the president has resumed drinking, during which he showed a doctored photo of Laura Bush with a black eye and a bandage over her eyebrow. The late Christopher Hitchens criticized Maher for it. “It must be to his credit he (the President) got Laura Bush to marry him. She’s an absolutely extraordinary woman,” said Hitchens. Maher’s response? “Oh, come on. That’s like Hitler’s dog loved him. That is the silliest reason…”

Maher obviously has “issues” with conservative women. He has called former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin a “dumb twat” and a “c**t.” He also “joked” about former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s wife needing a vibrator. Such intellectual “prowess” is matched by Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi, who wrote a column in which he imagined columnist Michelle Malkin narrating her pieces with a “big hairy set of balls in her mouth.” In a recent piece for National Review, Malkin herself reveals that Taibbi’s misogyny is the tip of a rather large iceberg. “If I had a dollar for every time libs have called me a ‘Manila whore’ and ‘Subic Bay bar girl,’ I’d be able to pay for a ticket to a Hollywood-for-Obama fundraiser,” she writes.

In the same piece Malkin also acknowledges an obvious reality: Sarah Palin is Target Number One when it comes to sexually abusing conservative women. Photoshopped pictures of her in a bikini have been published all over the web. A pornographic video starring porn actress Lisa Ann as Palin was released by Hustler with the title “Who’s Nailin’ Palin.” Leftist author Joe McGinniss literally moved next door to Palin in Alaska in order to write a book about her. “The Rogue” contains unsubstantiated gossip regarding Palin’s “fetish for black guys” and attempts to justify the leftist conspiracy theory that Trig is not really her son. “It is perhaps the most blistering assessment of her character possible that many Wasillans who’d known Sarah from high school onward told me that even if she had not faked the entire story of her pregnancy and Trig’s birth, it was something she was eminently capable of doing,” he writes. He amplifies his misogynistic efforts by characterizing Palin as a stripper who ”practices politics as lap dance, and we’re the suckers who pay the price. Members of our jaded national press corps eagerly stuff hundred dollar bills into her g-string, even as they wink at one another to show that they don’t take her seriously.”

The nine-minute video, shot with a student’s cell phone or other video device and uploaded to YouTube, is aimed at the ceiling and shows neither teacher nor students. Much of the audio is crowded with crosstalk, as the class sounds fairly disorderly throughout. But it does capture a heated confrontation between a desperately, illogically, and inarticulately defensive social studies teacher and a couple of her freethinking students who dared to express irreverence for Obama.

The footage begins with the teacher in a North Rowan High School classroom discussing the recent allegation that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney bullied a classmate in prep school over four decades ago. “Didn’t Obama bully somebody, though?” a student asks. “Not to my knowledge,” the teacher replies.

Apparently her knowledge isn’t as broad as that of the students, who proceed to inform her about an incident Obama describes in his purported autobiography Dreams from My Father, in which he details how he teased and shoved a middle-school girl — the only other black student in his grade. The teacher’s response is a dismissive “I don’t know.” When she tries to shut the discussion down, the students quickly and correctly point out the unfairness of her bias: “If you’re gonna talk trash about one side,” a student says, “you gotta talk trash about the other.”

“Stop, no, because there is no comparison,” the teacher says sharply. Romney, she says, is merely “running for president. Obama is the president,” and he “is due the respect that every other president is due.” When the student perceptively notes that they’re both “just men, they’re equal,” the teacher retorts, “No, they’re not,” and continues to argue that Romney does not deserve the same respect as a sitting president.

“But Obama is not God,” one student protests, a taboo statement certain to cause the heads of leftist educators everywhere to explode. “Listen, let me tell you something, you will not disrespect the President of the United States in this classroom,” the teacher says. The student asserts that he’ll say what he wants. “Not about him, you won’t,” the teacher shoots back. The student persists in arguing that he intended no disrespect; he was merely asking a question. Just as persistently, the teacher sidesteps his point and lectures him about slandering the president. Apparently she is unacquainted with the definition of “slander,” since the student was merely referring to an episode from Obama’s own autobiography.

“When Bush was in, everybody talked shit about Bush,” another student counters. “’Cause he was shitty,” interjects another student, and the teacher does not berate her for it. Instead, she changes tack and continues to target the original student: “Do you realize that people were arrested for sayin’ things bad about Bush?… Do you realize you are not supposed to slander the president?” She knows that neither of these statements is true. If it were illegal to slander a president, half the country would have been incarcerated during the Bush administration.

This is the message of supporters of the beleaguered Elizabeth Warren, the U.S. Senate hopeful whose baseless claims of Native American heritage have hurt her political career almost as much as it helped her academic career.

“Warren’s claim to be ‘part Indian’ is correct in mythical terms,” Bernie Quigley rationalizes at The Hill. “Every old-school white Oklahoman is in this regard even if this [is] nominally not true. But it is not a lie to want to be Indian and to imagine your ancestors were. It is to be free of Europeanism.” The Fourth Estate fanboy writes that Warren “brings a fresh, classical Americanism from the heartland back to us in Boston,” which he adds is “lucky” to have her.  “She adds stock and substance.”

The Harvard Law professor may add substance. But her devotees’ contorted embrace of the embarrassing ancestry yarn seems as readily explained by substances as any substance behind it. With proffered evidence of the Cherokee background of Warren’s great-great-great grandmother coming from the 21st century rather than the 19th, the already flimsy basis for the professor claiming minority status in an affirmative-action-obsessed academia now appears so obviously a careerist’s exploitation of identity politics. Just don’t tell that to the Warrenites, whose devotion to St. Elizabeth doesn’t allow for any inference of deception on her part.

When The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner dubbed Warren a “progressive super-hero” last year, he may have knocked a progressive deity down a notch.Her fanatical acolytes have routinely put the cart before the horse, all but confirming Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau before President Obama had announced a nominee and launching several 2016 “Warren for President” sites before a vote had been cast in her senate race in Massachusetts. The New Republic’s Tiffany Stanley took notice in an article subtitled “Inside the cult of Elizabeth Warren.” She noted that “Warren commands a legion of loyalists apparently willing to rush, at a moment’s notice, to her defense,” an observation confirmed by Stanley’s subsequent experience of an inbox full of hate mail.

The magnitude of this tragic mayhem can be viewed in another light. According to a Tuskegee Institute study, between the years 1882 and 1968, 3,446 blacks were lynched at the hands of whites. Black fatalities during the Korean War (3,075), Vietnam War (7,243) and all wars since 1980 (8,197) come to 18,515, a number that pales in comparison with black loss of life at home. It’s a tragic commentary to be able to say that young black males have a greater chance of reaching maturity on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan than on the streets of Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, Newark and other cities.

A much larger issue is how might we interpret the deafening silence about the day-to-day murder in black communities compared with the national uproar over the killing of Trayvon Martin. Such a response by politicians, civil rights organizations and the mainstream news media could easily be interpreted as “blacks killing other blacks is of little concern, but it’s unacceptable for a white to kill a black person.”

There are a few civil rights leaders with a different vision. When President Barack Obama commented about the Trayvon Martin case, T. Willard Fair, president of the Urban League of Greater Miami, told The Daily Caller that “the outrage should be about us killing each other, about black-on-black crime.” He asked rhetorically, “Wouldn’t you think to have 41 people shot (in Chicago) between Friday morning and Monday morning would be much more newsworthy and deserve much more outrage?” Former NAACP leader Pastor C.L.

The first day of the conference brought in approximately eighty people at its peak, including a number of women in hijab (head scarf), typing furiously on laptops. Others sported keffiyehs and dreadlocks; a smattering of Arabic and French could be heard; and a scruffy, bearded fellow wandered around with what appeared to be a journal under his arm, Historicizing Anti-Semitism, that one suspects is not exactly kosher. It was just another day in Berkeley.

Hatem Bazian, IRDP director, Near Eastern studies senior lecturer, and conference convener started out by apologizing for the forty-minute delay in kicking off the event. He chalked it up to “Muslim Time”—a reference to the popular phrase among African-Americans, “Colored People’s Time”—and joked that “Swiss watches run forward, but Muslim watches run backward.” He thanked the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)—an Islamist organization posing as a defender of civil rights— for its participation in the conference (Zahra Billoo, CAIR Northern California Executive Director, spoke the next day) and for partnering with CRG to produce the 2011 report, “Same Hate, New Target: Islamophobia and Its Impact in the United States”—a report that falsely accuses a number of public figures of perpetrating “Islamophobia.” Bazian also thanked “individuals who send us hate mail” for demonstrating “the need for this conference,” about which, he claimed, there had been “considerable chatter,” including “wild” and “threatening” statements. All this “despite the fact that we have the first Muslim president,” he added, chuckling. This sarcastic reference to the American public’s perception of Barack Obama’s Muslim background would be repeated throughout the day as incontrovertible evidence of “Islamophobia.”

Tariq Ramadan, the controversial Oxford University professor of contemporary Islamic studies and grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna, demonstrated a capacity for what his critics have described as doublespeak with his keynote speech. Titled, “A Global Perspective on Constructing Muslim Otherness,” Ramadan’s talk was rife with contradiction. At one point, he acknowledged that the “victim mentality” is counterproductive for Muslims and other minorities:

People are relying on fear, mistrust, [and] nurturing the victim mentality. You can see this among Blacks, Latinos, [and] Muslims. Sometimes they play the victims. Victims are talking to each other. We are the victims of your colonization, legal colonization. It’s the way you accept the role given by the dominant: you become the victim.   

Yet pushing victimhood was the principal purpose of the conference. Moreover, Ramadan contributed to that narrative by implying that assimilation—the antidote to the balkanization caused by nurturing a victim mentality—was impossible in the U.S.:

At the end of the day, you might be a Muslim-American, Black, Latino, but not really. Us versus them. . . . After four generations, you are Muslim with an American background.

Ramadan admitted that something other than mere bigotry might be at the heart of what’s been disingenuously dubbed “Islamophobia”:

[S]ome of them are very sincere when it comes to being scared of the Muslim presence. . . . Try to understand the logic that is behind the whole thing . . . there is a great deal of mistrust towards our intentions as Muslims. We should go beyond the discussion of ‘we are discriminated’ towards a more comprehensive approach. . . . People can be genuinely scared; we have to face this.

He then added:

We have to get rid of this idea that the world is divided between the West and Islam. Instead of speaking about peace and living together, we respond with a discourse that is exactly the same.

But he went on to do just that, accusing both Republicans and Democrats of collusion—although he allowed that “some are less Islamophobic than others”—and claiming that “the people who are pushing it [are] the Tea Party and the Neocons.” Given that the Tea Party has focused exclusively on economic issues and that Neoconservatism is hardly a political force to be reckoned with of late, Ramadan’s rhetoric was hopelessly out of touch.

Ramadan eventually revealed why so many find him so dangerous by hinting at a belief in conspiracy theories surrounding the 9/11 attacks and the Mohamed Merah shootings in Toulouse, France, which resulted in the deaths of three soldiers, a rabbi, and three children at a Jewish school. Acknowledging that “there is a new anti-Semitism in France, which is coming from Arabs and Muslims,” he then accused “strong Zionist groups” of complicity for somehow “nurturing this kind of racism.” As he put it:

I know about 9/11, but I still have some questions about behind the scenes, the way it was used . . . I still have questions about what happened in France [Toulouse]. We should try to understand the alliances we find behind old enemies.

To imply that “Zionists”  are benefiting from atrocities against Jews and others goes beyond the realm of conspiracy theory into classical anti-Semitism.

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Among the biggest lies of the welfare states on both sides of the Atlantic is the notion that the government can supply the people with things they want but cannot afford. Since the government gets its resources from the people, if the people as a whole cannot afford something, neither can the government.

There is, of course, the perennial fallacy that the government can simply raise taxes on “the rich” and use that additional revenue to pay for things that most people cannot afford. What is amazing is the implicit assumption that “the rich” are all such complete fools that they will do nothing to prevent their money from being taxed away. History shows otherwise.

After the Constitution of the United States was amended to permit a federal income tax, in 1916, the number of people reporting taxable incomes of $300,000 a year or more fell from well over a thousand to fewer than three hundred by 1921.

Were the rich all getting poorer? Not at all. They were investing huge sums of money in tax-exempt securities. The amount of money invested in tax-exempt securities was larger than the federal budget, and nearly half as large as the national debt.

This was not unique to the United States or to that era. After the British government raised their income tax on the top income earners in 2010, they discovered that they collected less tax revenue than before. Other countries have had similar experiences. Apparently the rich are not all fools, after all.

In today’s globalized world economy, the rich can simply invest their money in countries where tax rates are lower.

So, if you cannot rely on “the rich” to pick up the slack, what can you rely on? Lies.

Nothing is easier for a politician than promising government benefits that cannot be delivered.

Pensions such as Social Security are perfect for this role. The promises that are made are for money to be paid many years from now — and somebody else will be in power then, left with the job of figuring out what to say and do when the money runs out and the riots start.

There are all sorts of ways of postponing the day of reckoning. The government can refuse to pay what it costs to get things done. Cutting what doctors are paid for treating Medicare patients is one obvious example.

That of course leads some doctors to refuse to take on new Medicare patients. But this process takes time to really make its full impact felt — and elections are held in the short run. This is another growing problem that can be left for someone else to try to cope with in future years.

Increasing amounts of paperwork for doctors in welfare states with government-run medical care, and reduced payments to those doctors, in order to stave off the day of bankruptcy, mean that the medical profession is likely to attract fewer of the brightest young people who have other occupations available to them — paying more money and having fewer hassles. But this too is a long-run problem — and elections are still held in the short run.

Eventually, all these long-run problems can catch up with the wonderful-sounding lies that are the lifeblood of welfare state politics. But there can be a lot of elections between now and eventually — and those who are good at political lies can win a lot of those elections.

As the day of reckoning approaches, there are a number of ways of seeming to overcome the crisis. If the government is running out of money, it can print more money. That does not make the country any richer, but it quietly transfers part of the value of existing money from people’s savings and income to the government, whose newly printed money is worth just as much as the money that people worked for and saved.

Printing more money means inflation — and inflation is a quiet lie, by which a government can keep its promises on paper, but with money worth much less than when the promises were made.

Is it so surprising voters with unrealistic hopes elect politicians who lie about being able to fulfill those hopes?

This week’s guest was Frank Gaffney, the Founder and President of the Washington D.C.-based Center for Security Policy (CSP), a nonprofit organization for national security research and policy advocacy founded in 1988. Gaffney and his center have recently produced a free, ten-part, online “video briefing” entitled “The Muslim Brotherhood in America: A Video Course,” designed to educate American citizens about “a threat most Americans are even unaware even exists within our country, let alone the peril it represents.” See Mark Tapson’s Frontpage report on this video course here.

To listen to the program, click here.

Or go to: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/radio-jihad/2012/05/23/the-jamie-glazov-show

See you next Tuesday evening!

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Question & Answer Session

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Egypt’s long awaited and much anticipated presidential elections—the first of their kind to take place in the nation’s 7,000 year history—are here.  As we await the final results—and as the Western mainstream media fixate on images of purple-stained fingers—it is well to remember that there is much more at stake in Egypt’s elections than the mere “right” to vote.

While some Egyptians are certainly voting according to their convictions, the fundamental divide revolves around religion—how much or how little the candidates in question are in favor of Islamic Sharia law.  In other words, Islamists are voting for Islamists—Abdel Mon‘im Abul Futuh and Muhammad Mursi—whereas non-Islamists (secularists, liberals, and non-Muslims) are voting for non-Islamists, such as Amr Musa and Ahmed Shafiq.

Bear in mind that this is not the same thing as American voters being divided between “liberal” Democrats and “conservative” Republicans; rather, this election is much more existential in nature—possibly cataclysmic for Egyptian society.  For, whereas both American Republicans and Democrats operate under the selfsame U.S. Constitution, in Egypt, an Islamist president will usher in Sharia law, which will fundamentally transform the nation.

One veiled woman interviewed yesterday at the voting polls put it best: “We came to elect the man who implements Sharia (Islamic law).  But I am afraid of liberals, secularists, Christians. I am afraid of their reaction if an Islamist wins. They won’t let it go easily. But God be with us.”

Interestingly, while she sums up the ultimate purpose Islamists like herself are voting—to empower “the man who implements Sharia”—she alsoprojects her own Islamist mentality onto non-Islamists, implying that if a Sharia-friendly president is fairly elected, non-Islamists will rebel.  In fact, it is the Islamists who are on record warning that if a secularist emerges as president, that itself will be proof positive that the elections were rigged, and anarmed jihad will be proclaimed.

None of this is surprising, considering that Islamists have not hid their abhorrence for democracy as an infidel heresy to be exploited as a gateway to a Sharia-enforcing theocracy which will, ironically, eliminate democracy.  Some have gone so far as to insist that cheating in elections to empower Sharia is an obligation.  And, rather than encourage Egyptians to vote for whom they think is best suited for Egypt, days prior to these elections, various authoritative Muslim clerics and institutions decreed that Egypt’s Muslims are “obligated” to vote for Sharia-supporting Islamists, while voters are “forbidden” to vote for non-Islamists—a proclamation with threats of hellfire.

At worst, the P5+1 diplomats will actually be aware of the true nature of the Iranian regime, but will act out the script of “negotiating constructively” with it so as to further certain ancillary goals—like lowering oil prices, boosting political fortunes, and above all, forestalling a possible Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

This constructive, reasonable Iran, ready to strike a deal and essentially having the same aims as the P5+1 countries except for a few bridgeable areas of disagreement, cannot be the same Iran that just this week called for the “full annihilation of Israel,” that has taken a steady toll of American lives in Iraq, that bragged earlier this month of its navy’s ability to threaten New York City, that has been responsible for an ongoing string of terrorist atrocities for over three decades, and that continues to intimidate its Persian Gulf neighbors with subversion and very real threats of conquest.

There is, indeed, a situation in which a regime like Iran’s would sue for reasonable terms and real compromise—if it were truly on the ropes. But, while the sanctions are taking an economic toll, not even the most determined optimists claim that Tehran is anywhere near teetering. Not while its nuclear program continues at full speed, and while, as Israeli analyst Lt.-Col. (ret.) Michael Segall notes, it has been continuing a policy of strategic “buildup, defiance, and power projection” in the face of all Western blandishments.

IAEA director-general Yukiya Amano’s claim on Tuesday, then, about an imminent—but still-unsigned—deal with Iran allowing inspection of some of its nuclear sites was a kind of ominous prelude to the Baghdad talks. It was the IAEA whose report last November—confirming all of Israel’s warnings about Iran’s unceasing progress toward the bomb—seemed to create a more serious atmosphere regarding the threat. It was Amano himself who heightened the sense of crisis in March by warning that Iran had tripled production of higher-grade enriched uranium.

If you want to understand why Newsweek put a badly photoshopped picture of Obama with a gay halo on its cover or features Romney doing a number from The Book of Mormon, you need only look at those numbers. Fifteen years ago desperate tactics like that were for alt weeklies like The Village Voice, but Time and Newsweek are the new Village Voice.

There is no news business anymore, just media trolls looking for a traffic handout, feeding off manufactured controversies that they create and then report on. Magazines and sites struggling to stay alive while preaching to a narrow audience which likes essays by leftist cranks and mocking pictures of conservatives. And they’re not alone; any magazine that still covers politics, covers it in the same exact way.

There are house-style differences between the New Yorker, which still features its trademark cartoons, and Vanity Fair and Esquire, and Time and Newsweek, but they are all basically the same. The same essays repeating the same views for the same audience; all of them fighting for that small slice of elitist leftist pie.

The real 1 percent is right there. That small elitist fragment of America which writes books for itself, makes TV shows for itself and writes outraged articles for itself about a tiny 1 percent elite that runs everything. It has its own books, its own TV shows, its own music, its own stores, its own stations, its own brands and now it has most of the magazines to itself. It’s a claustrophobic village raising its own inner child with inane repetitions of its narrow-minded views.

If I’m reading through a long mocking piece on Midwestern Republican primary voters who support Michele Bachmann or an essay by a Muslim columnist on American Islamophobia, how can I tell which magazine I’m reading? Easy. Is it the one with a gay Obama on the cover or the one with a woman breastfeeding a three-year-old?

The story is no longer the story. Now the cover is the story with magazines reporting on their own covers, which become the story. And the story? Who cares about the story really. You can know everything about the story by glancing at the cover. And then you don’t have to buy it anymore, which explains why newsstand sales aren’t doing too well.

Magazines like to tell advertisers that every single subscription sale actually means five or six readers across a family. That’s wishful thinking. Families with five or six members are not buying Time or Newsweek these days. They might be subscribing to Popular Mechanics or Ebony.

Don’t weep for Newsweek though. It’s a brand and brands never die. They just get dumbed down and sold and resold. Five years from now Newsweek may be an airline magazine or an internet portal tracking Twitter news trends, but it will be around in one form or another. For now there’s Newsweek Polska with a six figure circulation, Newsweek Korea with 40,000 readers and Newsweek Pakistan with 15,000 readers. Perhaps one day Newsweekwill be remembered as a Pakistani news mag that got its start in the States.

The brands may have a future, but the content doesn’t. There are only so many provocative essayists around and only so many people willing to buy badly photoshopped covers featuring the controversy of the week. The friction of the controversy makes dull people seem interesting and stupid people seem smart. It makes the kind of people who moved to New York to be able to see Will Ferrell make fun of Bush on Broadway feel that they’re relevant, but there aren’t enough of them to support a magazine with international news bureaus and all the trappings of a serious news organization.

There’s barely enough money in that market to cover the expenses of Salon, Slate and The Nation, reliably lefty publications which cravenly feed their audiences its prejudices back in small doses. Time and Newsweek muscling into that same turf, not to mention every other site and magazine following that same business model, is a bit much.

In a recent episode of his MSNBC show, “Politics Nation,” he began by claiming that the Republican party is attempting to “dehumanize” President Obama, whatever that means. And in a jaw-dropping example of psychological projection, he accused them of engaging in “a long history of fear and smear.”

Projection comes from the Freudian lexicon.  The founder of psychoanalysis saw it as a defense mechanism whereby a person is in denial about his or her own attitudes and motivations, and instead attributes them to other people. It is a serious mental pathology of the left, and it accounts for leftists’ astonishing blind spot to their own intolerance, hatred, bigotry, and racism, which they instead ascribe to the right.

In another recent example, a fact-free opinion piece entitled “War on Students,” Sharpton informs his Huffington Post readers that there is a kind of warfare “that is ideological rather than physical.” This isn’t news to conservatives, who have learned the hard way that progressives are the ruthless masters of such combat. But Al, of course, asserts that “nobody knows the concept of waging these sorts of wars better than” – naturally – “Republicans”:

As a collective, they have waged virtual wars against women, immigrants and progressive groups… The latest victims in Republican warfare are the most defenseless among us – our children.

He’s referring to the diabolical Republican plot to keep “our children” in a “persistent cycle of poverty” by means of the crushing debt of student loans. He doesn’t explain why Republicans would want to choke off America’s future prosperity, nor does he address the fact that it is not they but the Obama administration that is driving our young people and everyone else into a “persistent cycle of poverty.”

Sharpton first thrust himself into the national spotlight in 1987, when he exploited the infamous Tawana Brawley case. The black 15-year-old in New York claimed she had been kidnapped and raped by a gang of six whites. Despite an absence of evidence to support her story, Sharpton made increasingly wild allegations, including the charge, without a shred of proof, that the assistant prosecutor himself had participated in the girl’s brutalization. Brawley’s tale eventually proved to be false, and the assistant prosecutor won a court judgment against Sharpton.

In 1991 Sharpton formed the National Action Network, whose platform involves a rather unfocused range of activism regarding everything from racial profiling to police brutality, women’s issues to public education, job awareness to international affairs, abolishing slavery in Africa, and more.

That same year Sharpton showed just what kind of activism he espouses. Anti-Jewish riots erupted in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights after a Hasidic Jew accidentally ran over and killed a 7-year-old black boy. Delivering the eulogy at the funeral, Sharpton blamed Jewish “apartheid” rather than a car accident, and got the mourners fired up about the local “diamond merchants”: “All we want is what Jesus said. If you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise, no meetings, no coffee klatsch, no skinnin’ and grinnin’.” Within three hours of his eulogy, a black mob had hunted down and killed an innocent rabbinical student in retaliation.

Unapologetic as always, Sharpton organized angry demonstrations: “No justice, no peace!” he shouted. Hundreds of Crown Heights blacks took to the streets for three days and nights of rioting, which Sharpton excused by stating, “We must not reprimand our children for outrage, when it is the outrage that was put in them by an oppressive system.”

Before getting into the full litany of the president’s “oh well” approach to friends and allies, let’s stay with the Afridi situation for a moment. First, on its face, this is a travesty of justice—even according to Pakistani law. After all, if this man is guilty of treason for collaborating with the CIA, what about the Pakistani military’s on-again-off-again collaboration with the CIA and DoD? Are Pakistan’s president and generals going to be jailed for decades for their cooperation—albeit halfhearted or perhaps quarter-hearted—with Washington?

More importantly, we shouldn’t lose sight of the central fact that Afridi helped bring the world’s most notorious, most wanted, most infamous mass-murderer to justice. The trial of Afridi and the verdict reveal just how broken Pakistan is—something many observers, including myself, have pointed out for many years (here, here, here and here). If the best we can hope for is a transactional, interests-only relationship with Islamabad, then someone in the Obama administration needs to ask—amid Pakistan’s treatment of Afridi, sheltering of bin Laden, aiding of the Haqqani network and Taliban, outing of U.S. operatives, blockading of Afghanistan-bound equipment, firing on U.S. forces across the AfPak border—what exactly the United States is getting in the exchange.

If Washington had a sense of honor, it would demand Afridi’s release by a date certain and allow Islamabad to contemplate the consequences of not complying—a cutoff in aid, an expulsion of Pakistan’s diplomatic corps, a public unveiling and shaming of Pakistan’s duplicitous military-intelligence apparatus, another U.S. raid into the country.

This new information constitutes only a small portion of the massive collection of information turned over by the prosecution as part of discovery.  Upon reading through the 183 pages of documents, it becomes apparent that George Zimmerman should have never been charged with second degree murder, as I have maintained since the beginning of the controversy at the Daily Kos.

From the onset, media have selectively reported the facts to create a fantasy narrative where George Zimmerman stalked and shot a helpless unarmed teenager. The media ignored the mountain of evidence that suggests that Trayvon Martin was on top of George Zimmerman beating him when he was shot, and that Zimmerman acted out of fear of death or serious injury. The media instead focused on the speculative testimony of Mary Cutcher and Selma Mora Lamilla over an actual eyewitness account from a man identified by the press as “John.” That the rest of the evidence strongly supported “John’s” version of events made the false narrative crafted by the media even more outrageous. When Police Chief Bill Lee released a statement saying that Zimmerman had claimed self-defense and that the evidence supported him, the media attacked Lee. Now that the evidence has come out, we see that it weighs on the side of Police Chief Lee and against the people who attacked him.

George Zimmerman had a broken nose, two black eyes, and lacerations on the back of his head. Trayvon Martin, in contrast, had no injuries aside from the gunshot wound and a small abrasion on his knuckles. Responding officers and paramedics witnessed George Zimmerman’s injuries and medical records confirm them. An eyewitness stated that a man matching George’s description was being pummeled while screaming for help. The lead investigator, who wanted to charge Zimmerman with manslaughter, determined that the voice screaming for help was George Zimmerman’s.

All of this evidence does weigh on the side of George Zimmerman’s version of events, as leaked to the Orlando Sentinel. In light of these developments, I thought I would review the basic questions of the case:

Did George Zimmerman follow Trayvon Martin after he was advised it was unnecessary?

This is unclear from the evidence. However, Dale Gilbreath, an investigator for the state, testified that none of the evidence contradicted George Zimmerman’s claim that he had stopped following Martin and was returning to his vehicle when Martin confronted him. The lead investigator, Christopher Serino, does not specifically state that Zimmerman followed Martin after he was advised not to.

Ed Schultz claimed the chart exposed “the big myth” about Obama’s spending: “This chart — the truth — very clearly shows the truth undoubtedly.” And the truth was, the “growth in spending under President Obama is the slowest out of the last five presidents.”

Note that Schultz also said that the “part of the chart representing President Obama’s term includes a stimulus package, too.” As we shall see, that is a big, fat lie.

Schultz’s guest, Reuters columnist David Cay Johnston confirmed: “And clearly, Obama has been incredibly tight-fisted as a president.”

Everybody’s keyboard OK?

On her show, Rachel Maddow proclaimed: “Factually speaking, spending has leveled off under President Obama. Spending is not skyrocketing under President Obama. Spending is flattening out under President Obama.”

In response, three writers from “The Daily Show” said, “We’ll never top that line,” and quit.

Inasmuch as this is obviously preposterous, I checked with John Lott, one of the nation’s premier economists and author of the magnificent new book with Grover Norquist: Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future.

(I’m reviewing it soon, but you should start without me.)It turns out Rex Nutting, author of the phony Marketwatch chart, attributes all spending during Obama’s entire first year, up to Oct. 1, to President Bush.That’s not a joke.That means, for example, the $825 billion stimulus bill, proposed, lobbied for, signed and spent by Obama, goes in … Bush’s column. (And if we attribute all of Bush’s spending for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and No Child Left Behind to William Howard Taft, Bush didn’t spend much either.)